YES. YES. YES. YES. I can never decide between making them vampires or bug related. BOTH OF THEM IS SO SMART. GROWOWOWOWOOWOWOWOWOWOWO!!! I love when people lock in like this 😍
Yes. I did give my mom money to buy me a whole cookie cake for myself so I didn't feel fat buying it myself. And yes I will eat the entire thing myself.
summary: what had become of his wife but a wasting woman in their bed, mocking him with the warmth and affection he will never again know? or in other words, you are dying, and you must teach patrick to accept it.
tags and warnings: bittersweet angst, hopeful ending, 3rd person perspective, use of Y/N, death and talks of death, reader has heart problems intentionally left pretty vague, talks of reader’s burial and resting grounds, devastated and yearning patrick, reader does not die in the fic but she does not get better, read this if you love men who yearn and mourn and pine and grieve
a/n: ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a dead wife. if a man who yearns is a man who earns, a man who mourns surely fucks like porn. i’ll go ahead and trademark myself on that one. their conversation is heavily inspired by faye and kratos’s conversation in god of war 5, you’ll probably notice the similarities
taglist: @the-bee-creations @mxss-rosebud @bluesycatharsis @jimmythecookiemonster @honkimimimimi @b1bbles @the-lilted-tune @narl8d (comment to be added)
To die in the house of a surgeon seemed to Y/N like a cushion to a hard fall. And from the patient’s perspective, perhaps it was. For the doctor, it was slow, agonizing torture.
It had been a steady build up to the state of bedriddency she’d found herself in now. Troubles with her heart, that much was certain. Small, skipped beats at first. Then longer between each pump of blood. Patrick was well familiar with it. And in these moments, her marriage to a surgeon was a wonderful blessing. A diagnosis at the ready. Care without setting foot in a disease ridden hospital. For Patrick, this was the most mortifying task of his career.
When it came to his work, it was easy to detach person from body. To view his patients as mere legs, arms, torsos. To maintain a sense of professionalism and indifference rather than allow his work to be squandered by emotion and compassion.
But this was his dear fucking Y/N. And the separation between professional indifference and overwhelming grief was one he could not find in himself.
After she had collapsed in his office one day, unable to even gasp for air in Patrick's arms until her heart awoke again like a stuttering engine, he had her confined to the bed. Which naturally meant Patrick practically abandoning his work to be at her side. He had tried to continue on, at first, but the sight of the empty chair in his office and the only sound in the room the tickling grandfather clock, he felt the great immensity of her absence and found himself crumpling at his desk, a sob straining against his throat.
So he stayed at her side, hunched on a chair pulled next to the bed. He'd check her vitals in 10 minute intervals as a form of self-soothing, adjusting pillows and straightening blankets. All the while Y/N, who was in an upsettingly calm mood about this all, allowed him to poke and prod at her to his heart’s content.
She watched her husband with quiet affection. Here he was, a surgeon who had performed countless operations without so much as a blink of distress, a doctor who often left the compassionate bedside care to the far more qualified nurses, fumbling over her comfortability in the bed that had once been shared by the both of them. (Patrick had taken up sleeping in the chair.)
He pulled the thermometer from between Y/N’s lips, scrutinizing the reading. “Any pain?”
Y/N hums. “My elbow’s rather sore.”
The look Patrick levels her is deeply unamused. “Y/N,” he sighs, lips pressing into a thin line.
He grabs for her wrist, not only to check her pulse, which he’d already done thrice in the past hour, but because touching her was becoming an obsessive compulsion. He traced his thumb over the delicate bones of her hand like she might dissolve beneath his fingers. They’d begun to poke through her skin.
She exhales deeply and theatrically. “You’ll forgive me, I’m dreadfully bored.”
Patrick's brows pinch tighter. He clutches her hand like an anchor. “Your heart is failing,” he strains. “This is not some trifling fever or cold, Y/N.”
“Now when had I said that?”
Patrick’s nostrils flare. “Your tone,” he says, “I am beginning to grow weary of the way you speak, as if this is nothing more than a mild inconvenience to you.” There was an undeniable quake in his voice.
Her tone is even when she speaks, holding a composure Patrick lacks. “Because I am not wallowing in fear and self pity, I have no respect for my life? That is what you mean to imply?”
“I—... God,” he breathes out sharply, running a hand through his hair in frustration. He swallows hard and lifts her hand to his lips to press a desperate kiss to her knuckles.
She squeezes his hand in response, and he nearly breaks at the weak shudder he feels in her grip. Her gaze is distant when she speaks again. “Death is a natural part of life, my love.” She inhales deeply, letting the air wash over her and through her body. Patrick can focus only on watching the slow rise and fall behind her ribcage. She offers him the slightest smile. “I am glad to have you here with me, bored as I am.”
He has no interest in hearing this. About the inevitable. He is a surgeon, and surgeons fix things, they don't just sit by bedsides waiting for the inevitable. But here he was, watching every breath she took like each one could be her last.
Natural part of life, she says. He had spent years cutting open bodies, peeling back skin to expose the mechanics beneath. He knew death intimately. But it wasn't fair to assume she didn't know it just the same. That her philosophy held no water. Maybe the truth of it wasn’t the issue. After all, in a better frame of mind, he would agree. It was only the fact that it was so suddenly hard for him to accept when it came to her.
He doesn't want to hear philosophy about death. He wants her alive. He wants the years ahead they had planned, not this slow descent into silence.
Restless, he busies himself with checking her vitals again, refusing to meet the eyes that bore holes into him. “You are quiet now,” she observes.
“I have nothing to say.” His fingers press to the pulse point at the base of her throat. He counts silently in his head.
“Well… speak to me, why don’t you? Your voice always soothes me.”
Patrick exhales sharply through his nose.
His lips part. He wants to tell her about the new medical journal he’d ordered last week she would love to skim through, about how they were going to redecorate the library together in spring. He wants to complain about that insufferable maid who keeps bringing his tea too strong.
But he cannot. He opens his mouth, but nothing follows.
Y/N sees the war within him and frowns. “My request for the funeral, then, does it upset you?”
Her wish for what would become of her deceased body, it wasn't deeply unexpected of her. But with the swirling emotions within Patrick at the moment, the familiar entombing would've been a small comfort much preferred.
He wants to argue, to beg her not to speak of it at all, but he knows better than that. Y/N had always been forthright about these things. He closes his eyes briefly. “...I suppose not,” he finally murmurs hoarsely after a long pause. “If that is what you wish.”
She already knows his true feelings. She addresses them directly, metaphorically skewering this elephant in the room he took his sweet time dancing around. “You would rather me caged in a box in the ground until the end of days.”
The facade breaks instantly. “I want to remember you where I can see you.”
If Patrick had the say, he would have her in a coffin, sealed away neatly, where he could visit whenever the grief overwhelmed him. Where he could bring fresh flowers every Sunday like a proper mourning husband. Though saying that aloud felt morbid, it was the truth of the matter.
Y/N considers him. “I’m charmed,” she says finally, “that you are so particular about where my corpse lie after it’s gone cold.”
“It is not about the corpse, Y/N,” he grits. “It's about having a place to go when— when you are gone. Somewhere tangible that holds your body still. A grave with flowers and your name etched into stone would certainly bring about more comfort than an empty patch of earth where nothing marks your existence.”
“The life sprouting where I rest would surely tell you more about my existence than some cold rock with my name on it," she replies automatically.
Life. She wanted a tree to sprout from her decomposing body. Something living and growing where she once laid, before being reclaimed by earth herself. It was poetic and beautiful in the way Y/N always saw things. But he didn't want poetry or symbolism. He just wanted somewhere to visit where he could fool himself she hadn’t truly left him entirely.
He exhales sharply through his nose, teeth clamping down on his tongue. “…A tree is fine.”
She grasps for his hand again, which he takes eagerly, as though searching to feel the warmth of life still within her. “You cannot blame me for wanting control over my ending, can you?”
His thumb traces over her knuckles, slow and reverent. “Of course not,” he mutters. “You've always been in control of everything else— your household, your opinions... Why should death be any different?” The irony isn’t lost on him. She being the one staring death in the eye at the foot of her bed, yet so entirely composed, while he sits there unraveling like a poor stitch.
Patrick lifts her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to each finger, one by one, before resting his forehead against the back of it. He doesn't speak. There is nothing left to say that hasn't already been argued or decided.
She watches his display with quiet unhappiness. “I will not die tomorrow, Patrick, nor the next day, so do not grieve me as though I am not here and alive with you now. Do not mourn me yet.”
But the grief had long taken root. “Then what should I do?” He raises his head, his expression bordering on fury. “Laugh with you? Read to you? Pretend this isn't happening?” His eyes are glassy, furious at himself for being so weak when she needed strength from him most. After all, she was likely far more fearful than she was letting on, rather just pulling herself in the opposite direction emotionally for the sake of balancing out the both of them.
He scoffs. A bitter, humorless sound. “Yes, I suppose is the answer. Because the alternative is sitting here like a fool waiting for you to stop breathing. To watch you waste away while I— I do nothing. All my time as a surgeon means nothing because the one person I cannot fix is you. Every other patient I’ve had was a stranger. A body on a table. But you… you are mine. As I am yours. And I can't— God, I can't even fucking save you.”
“You are not meant to save me, Patrick.”
That was of course the most painful truth of all. That medicine had limits, and his wife’s heart was beyond them. But the helplessness was nearly unbearable.
When he speaks again, his voice is small, lost. “...Then what am I supposed to do?” His ever-steady hands tremble violently where they clutch hers. “I can't go back to before,” he chokes out. “I was nothing before you. A hollow shell of a man who didn’t feel anything. Not love, not grief… nothing. And now you're leaving me and I'll be just that again.” The terror in his voice is raw and unguarded for the first time since her diagnosis.
Y/N’s eyes are suddenly filled with conviction. “You will never lose me, Patrick. We have changed each other too irreversibly. You, a part of me. I, a part of you.”
His breath steadies slightly as she holds his gaze. He commits to memory the exact shade of her eyes, the flecks of color near her pupils. He’s not one for grand philosophies, preferring the rationality of the present. But he’s so tired of the pain, of the ache in his heart, he’d agree to any philosophical conclusion if it meant a balm to his wounded soul.
He nods slowly, hanging on her every word. “…Yes.”
“Do you understand? There is nowhere you can go where I will not follow you. I have changed you, yes, and that change will remain within you until you join me. It is not something death will undo.”
Patrick's lip quivers like a child’s. He wants to believe her so badly, and it terrifies him how much he clings to those words like a lifeline. “Yes,” he whispers again, stiff and broken before pressing his forehead against hers, eyes shut tight as if that could keep this moment from ending.
She does the same, sitting for a moment in the presence of him, their breaths mingling. Her frail hand comes to rest on his cheek. “You have loved me fiercely, and you will grieve me fiercely. The ache will say you’ve loved me well, a love which has no longer a place to rest. But the world will not stop to let you mourn.” She pulls back enough to capture his eyes again, studying him. “You allowed me to open this heart of yours,” She trails her hand down to his breast, flattening her palm over his rapidly beating heart, “now do not let fear seal it shut once I am gone. Do not let my absence turn your heart back into stone. There will be love and joy and beauty after me, Patrick. Find it, and you will find me again.”
Patrick’s throat tightens at her words, devastating to him as they were lovely.
He had spent his life analyzing and dissecting emotions like specimens under glass, never allowing them to truly touch him. But Y/N had cracked him open without even trying.
Tears spill over before he can stop them, silent and hot as they roll down his cheeks. “God,” is all he manages to say between shuddering breaths. Her fingertips brush away the tears with a tenderness that makes his heart ache.
She had taught him so much. And now here she was, teaching him how to grieve, and before the loss had even come.
He allows himself to float his head down into her lap, trembling hands coming to hold the waist buried in the cover of the blankets. In response, Y/N cards her fingers through his hair, the same way she had done when he first fell asleep in her arms some years ago. She hums softly, an old lullaby. From where, he does not know, but the comfort of the melody engulfs him.
Patrick clings to the sensation of it all, the weight of her hand, the warmth beneath his cheek, memorizing it before it would slip through his fingers like sand. And he suddenly sobs, shuddering cries wracking his entire body, the kind of pain that comes from deep within a man’s soul.
Still, she holds him as he releases weeks of repressed anguish.
Her eyes fall to the window, watching through the glass as the great cluster of leaves from the tree above ripple with the wind. The blossoms were budding, soon to bloom, vibrant and alive.
It’s only when he quiets again does she muse, “…Perhaps a marker, at the very least, would not be dreadful.”
With a choked breath, he nods against her thigh, and presses a kiss there in quiet gratitude for her compromise. “Thank you,” he murmurs into the blanket.
